Archive for July, 2012

This week the folks in charge of social media surrounding the Google Project Glass hardware on order right this second have created a set of Hangouts for the betterment of the project - but it didn't turn out all that great this afternoon. The first set of Google Glass Explorers hangouts ended in mass confusion and hopeful users ending up finding out little, if anything, about Google Glass that they didn't already know. Google Glass product manager Steve Lee and community manager Sarah Price hoped to hear feedback and ideas throughout the day.

Over the past week we've seen a giant amount of clues pointing toward a brand new iPhone appearing very soon, with several tips popping up today with the date September 12th attached to them. The newest of these is Jim Dalrymple of The Loop's one-word confirmation of the rumor: "yep" following in the footsteps of accuracy in the past, here affirming also that the phone will very likely be released on September 21st, nine days after the event. This joins news of an iPad mini / iPad 4th gen event that will likely take place at an entirely different time entirely - perhaps November, perhaps never.

After having been the interim CEO for Yahoo since May of 2012, Executive Vice President Ross Levinsohn has now decided that he will leave the company entirely. This decision is being reported as having been anticipated by many, but it's only after the hiring of former Google executive Marissa Mayer as CEO for Yahoo rather than just bumping him up, it appears to have been the mark Levinsohn needed to make the move. In a statement made this Monday, Levinsohn noted that "it's time for me to look for the next challenge."

I'm going to go right ahead and assume that most of the people checking out this review are here because they're confused about why SlashGear would review a vinyl record player. I think that's fair to wonder. There are two reasons, the first of which is the fact that this record player not only has audio input via a convenient little smartphone dock. The second is this: I've still got a massive stack of records that I want to play, and I'm certain that there's a massive population of readers out there that have their own, too - you don't just throw those things away!

It's time for a brand new tablet to show its massive face with the company that shares its name: Wikipad. This device was shown briefly earlier this year in a 7-inch iteration that didn't look especially unique without its utterly strange add-on controller - now it's being re-revealed with a 10-inch display, NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

With privacy being one of those hot-button issues now that we're living in a post-9/11 world, it can be hard to know who to trust when it comes to whether or not the government is collecting data on you. Take this weekend's development from the DefCon hacker conference, for instance: on the one hand, we have NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander telling attendees that the agency doesn't maintain files on American citizens, while on the other hand, we have former NSA official William Binney claiming during a panel discussion that the NSA does. Who do we trust in this case? We're not positive, but it sure does raise a few questions.

This week the folks at the analysis group Strategy Analytics have released a report on Wireless Smartphone Strategies which let it be known that while Android still dominates the domestic market, it's certainly slipped over the past year. And where Android has slipped, Apple's own iOS mobile operating system has grown rather rapidly. While Android currently (in the second quarter of 2012) shows a market share of 56.3% of the Smartphone Operating System market in the USA, it had a significantly larger 60.6% share of the market in the second quarter of 2011.

This week if you happen to be perusing some photos on Facebook, you'll find that the developers behind the layout section of Facebook's pages have done a bang-up job of making them look all the nicer. What you'll find is a grid of photos that's variable in both size and shape, with squares being the dominant figure in the Facebook photo gallery. You'll integration with this lovely view on your Timeline as well as behind the scenes, and much larger photos are included in the upgrade as well.

Last week, Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines sparked outrage among Skyrim fans when he pointed out that the studio hasn't announced the game's first DLC, Dawnguard, for any platforms other than Xbox 360. Now, Hines is promising that more information on the PC and PS3 versions of Dawnguard is coming soon, telling one perturbed Twitter follower over the weekend to "Just sit tight. We'll have info soon." Just how soon? A few hours ago, Hines tweeted that Bethesda should have that info later this week.

There is an alternate universe somewhere in which I am a lexicographer. I write dictionaries for a living. This is not the pipe dream of a grammar-obsessed former English teacher. Right out of grad school (Master’s in English), I turned down an opportunity to work for the Oxford English Dictionary. The job was for a specialist in Caribbean dialects of English. It sounded fantastic. The OED recruiters made clear this was not a stepping stone job for editors and writers. Being a lexicographer leads only to being a better, more experienced lexicographer. Instead, I took a job that involved writing and technology and pop culture, and my life was set on its course. But in an alternate world, I made a different choice and took the dictionary job, and now I sit in a dark apartment in Manhattan mumbling to myself about the horror of language on the Internet.